C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 95

The movie project is gaining ‘legs’…

It’s proliferated all through the entertainment/media sites… If you google Gates of Morgaine —you’ll find a ton of them, and now there’s a second producer showing up on some lists…

Name the 4 Phoenix captains….

please.

Btw, we have two new pages, one of them the Foreigner Wiki and the other the WHo’s Who.

Because there is a botnet action out there…Lynn’s suggesting a password change…

Could you all do a password update, just to make sure you’re secure. Hate to ask it, but some very bad people are trying bad nuisanceful things, and you can at least give them a poke in the eye for their trouble.

I think the text-patch will read…

Now it reads: Artur’s face, narrow-nosed and with a chipped front tooth — Irene’s, dark as an ateva, but brown, and eyes darker than her face, scarily dark, full of thoughts –

If I make it apply Bjorn, who was in the original 3, it can become—Artur’s face, narrow-nosed and with a chipped front tooth — Irene’s, pale as nand’ Bren’s; and Bjorn, dark as an ateva, but brown, and eyes darker than his face, scarily dark, always full of thoughts –

I like the description, but Irene’s become otherwise, and Bjorn still has to be defined…

Spammers…

…they keep trying. The bots keep trying. I’m assuming they’re bots, since once they do get on, they don’t seem to do anything but sit there. I’m getting pretty good at certain phonemic sets that don’t even try to vary, and if I have let one through, because I search by phoneme (smallest pronounceable unit of langage) I am almost certain to turn it up again. I’m getting a real feel for the set in use. So tiresome. I’m a little suspicious of some sort of bot network operating out of Nigeria but routing through Romania, or vice versa, and I’m wondering if it’s a software connection, a bot that was written in Nigeria. It’s really amazing how the same phonemes keep popping up in Nigeria, Romania, even China…and puzzling as to what they hope to do, ultimately, since somebody with a server named (one of the funnier ones) handbagsforyou is not too likely bent on world domination. But you never know how such things, allowed to sit there, could behave. So I faithfully boot them off.

If you are a legitimate reader who just happens to be using handbagsforyou as your server, alas, I am sorry. And if your name really is xiohgoaqg, again, I do apologize, but I am highly suspicious. And I have no desire to wait and see what these accounts ultimately do when the Evil Overlord sends the command down the network…

Alas, we lost our smallest fish—we stopped the eagle, but not the raccoons or local cats…

We have two kittehs who are regular visitors, and I don’t know, but they’re suspect right along with the raccoons. You can’t blame them. There’s no way for them to tell they’re not ‘free food.’ But we have to do something.

So…bird netting over our eagle-discouraging fishing line. I’ve tried it before, but anchoring it taut has been a pita, in our very irregular, rockbordered pond. I found some excellent stainless tent stakes at Walmart, just a spike with a bent hook at the top. Bury those, and they’re good for this purpose, hook net webbing in, stamp into the ground, and you’re good. So…

We’d rather not have the netting, but we view it as a way to let our fish get big enough to discourage predators. Notably, the eagle made a try at Ari, who’s large, and couldn’t lift off with her, but 99% of our losses have been 4-6″ fish. So we’re just going to bring up everybody beyond that size before we think of changing that netting back to just lines.

At least we can now relax.

Somebody just told me a neat thing: that vinegar will kill weeds, if used in a sprayer. I’m trying this out in the front walk. We hate using chemicals and poisons near the fish—or our water table, for that matter; and if I could sub vinegar, I’d do it in a New York minute.

Yrs truly in a boneheaded moment — forgot that Irene was darkskinned, darkhaired. Now, I can fix this in the e-book version—but—

……I could also, just in that one descriptive sentence in Deliverer—convert Irene to Bjorn, and make Bjorn wear that description.

When years intervene between books, alas, the brain goes to mush. Can someone e-mail me the ENTIRE passage where that description occurs, and tell me if Bjorn was ever described? I’d hate to have to correct it twice!

One thing with e-books, even for NYC, fixes are possible.

scary new world…film

Morgaine

Unusual for the PNW, we got drenched…

Absolute deluge. Sideways! Very unusual for Spokane. And something blew in—I got something stuck in my eye, and had to shower and scrub to get it out. Jane’s been complaining of eye pain. Can’t figure. But it’s a relief to have that gone.

Cold out there, too, despite the blue sky between the clouds. At least the greenhouse stayed earthbound.

Two copies of Protector left, 22 copies of Intruder p/b.

One last notice before I declare it over on FB…if you want them, you have first dibs.

Meanwhile, spring is springing here, at last: the tree peonies are just about to spread their leaves, the apple tree has sprigs, buds on the cherry trees are about to go, and I expect the dogwood and magnolia to be ready soon. Rhododendron is budded, azalea is getting there, and the warming of the water has brought all our koi up alive and well. We didn’t lose anybody in the winter, and Ari’s wound is much better. The pond, which I treated, is only half clear, but there are increasing bubbles, which indicates the bacterial additive is starting to work, and the water is getting clearer day by day.

I found a curious fellow in the filter yesterday, and did a little deep brain-search before I recognized him as a large dragonfly nymph. They’re dangerous to small fish, but fine with big ones, and I put him back in: curious that Mrs. Hoyt’s 5th grade class’s assignment of drawing and coloring the life cycle of a dragonfly should come back at such distance.

The name of our little garden is Tan Bo Mon, which is ‘Dragonfly Gate.’ And it is. We see quite a lot of them in the summer. Happy they’ve called us ‘home!’